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Comment by davely | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps! But I do think the vocabulary issue is real and I think LLMs are still sycophantic enough that they won’t really challenge someone or offer alternative ideas on how to implement something unless they explicitly ask.

Interestingly at my work, Claude Code was available before Claude Desktop, so a number of non-technical PMs tried to use it in order to build… anything, with very mixed success.

The “hey guys, check out the website I built with Claude: http://localhost:3000/” joke is real!

In my experience, the whole “the terminal is a scary place” aspect is very real and some non-technical people can feel intimidated by.

I think Claude Code in the desktop app helps alleviate that a bit (perhaps Codex, too, but man what a mess the ‘ol ChatGPT app has become).

But I’m sure there are entire repos of web dev skills that someone could use to put together things with a bit of effort.

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> the terminal is a scary place

Isn't the the powerful, unlimited, unopinionated blank LLM text input waiting for your instructions eerily similar to a scary terminal?

WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering, by design restrictions, enumeration of your few possible options. Those feel more constrained therefore safer.

> WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering

Are you kidding? WIMP and GUI democratized computing!

Democracy clearly disempowered the monarchs. :)

It did!

What "democratized computing" was cheaper computing and VisiCalc, not WIMP and GUI?

But again, VisiCalc is intentionally limited, it's not a all-powerful environment, on purpose. It's all about intentional limitations, making computation easier to reason about.

To put it more bluntly. Computer usage would be low if limited to terminal interactions and there’s no GUI.

Terminals are scary because it feels insurmountable. What are you supposed to do? If you just type “start python program” it gives you this absurd error that doesn’t make sense. What do you mean start is not in path?

The moment you interact with an LLM it gives you feedback that you’re doing things right. It feels like a gradual climb instead of a series of abrupt jumps. People really don’t like feeling like they don’t know what they’re doing, and the terminal constantly reminds you that you are making mistakes.

Scary but then liberating once you get to know what you have to type in to reach your objective.

Yeah, if you're willing to put in that much effort.

I started on this path literally about as soon as I could read thanks to the family having bought a Commodore 64 for my older siblings, but also perfect timing in that when I got to this age the sibling whose room it was in had just gone off to university.

Most people are not like this, in much the same way that they're not going to read the T&C end-to-end (another thing I've done) or learn enough law to actually understand what those words mean (a step too far even for me).

What an ode to exceptionalism /s

You also think that you are smarter than the people flooding Ceuta streets these days, don't you?

> What an ode to exceptionalism

I've had people criticise me for having had the opportunity to learn in that way, as they did not.

> You also think that you are smarter than the people flooding Ceuta streets these days, don't you?

No, why would I think that? I don't know them, the only thing I can say is in their favour: moving country to better your situation is difficult and them getting as far as they did is a demonstration of putting in a lot of effort of the exact type I praise by default.

I am old enough to have observed non-tech workers using all kinds of text-based interfaces and it was a real pleasure seeing how old ma's would jiggle numbers on the bc-style TUI in the way that would offset any modern CompSci major.

Me too. But did you see them on their first day using it or their thousandth?

(Also you don't need to be that old. Less than 10 years ago I watched a doctor breeze through some clinical system while I was crawling along constantly referring to the manual)

> Isn't the the powerful, unlimited, unopinionated blank LLM text input waiting for your instructions eerily similar to a scary terminal?

This is why it has the title (for me currently reading "What can I help with?" but this varies a lot) and the text box itself has the placeholder text "Ask anything". Sometimes I get big friendly suggestions about what to ask it, placed on screen near that text box.

> WIMP and GUI paradigms are the exact the opposite: intentional dis-empowering, by design restrictions, enumeration of your few possible options. Those feel more constrained therefore safer.

I don't think it's constraints, per se: almost nobody looks at the font list and goes "oh no, too many options!"

Rather, GUIs are there to organise your options visually, group them in ways easy to intuitively get. There's a bit of fashion-induced rot here, e.g. I'm old enough to remember when it was always unambiguous when you were looking at a checkbox vs. a radio button, and now there's a blurry middle ground of collections of boxes with ticks in them that act mutually exclusive, but the point of a GUI from a UX POV is not the same as how software in general drifted as it got both more users and more developers and more opinionated managers and middle managers and designers who only cared about shiny rather than usability.

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